PHPDeveloper.orghttp://www.phpdeveloper.org
Up-to-the Minute PHP News, views and communityen-usTue, 03 Mar 2015 14:32:31 -060030http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/17191http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/17191
Tom Schlick has a new post to his blog talking about a tool he's written for FuelPHP-based applications called Wrench. It's a command-line tool to make taking your site "offline" simpler.

If you have been following what I've been up to lately you would see that many of my recent projects are based on FuelPHP. Since Fuel is so awesome and allows you to create "packages" that can be dropped into your application, I have created a few that help me quickly piece together apps. The first package I'm "releasing" is called Wrench.

The tool works with the oil command-line tool already included in the framework to swap out the default action with a "Down for Maintenance" message. It will look at the current state of the app and switch it to the opposite when run, but you can also define "start" and "finish" manually if you'd like. You can find the source for the package on Tom's github account.

]]>Wed, 30 Nov 2011 12:40:57 -0600http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/16205http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/16205
On his blog today Victor Farazdagi introduces a new tool he's developed to help make the creation of static sites even easier - Phrozn, a static site generator that takes content and wraps it in a site's template and structure and outputs it for easy integration.

Given the scale of how client-side technologies (such as JavaScript) evolved, most of dynamic functionality can be implemented using client-side scripts + remote web-services (e.g. Disqus for comments). More than often we a going down that road even on our completely dynamic sites - it makes things more simple.

He gives the example of being able to write the content in VIM and run a single application - Phrozn - and generate the new page to add to the site. He sees it as a good alternative to something like WordPress where most people only use 1% of the functionality it offers. You can find out more about the project by looking into its documentation or you can just dive into the code by grabbing it from github. As a side note, several other tools, like Jekyll are "blog aware" and can be used similarly.

]]>Fri, 15 Apr 2011 11:02:03 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/15334http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/15334
On the PHPClasses.org blog Manuel Lemos has posted part two of his look at techniques to help speed up your site - a few things that you maybe hadn't thought of before.

In the previous article I talked about one important factor that often seriously affects the user perception of the speed of a site, which is the presence of content from external sites that slows down the load of pages, such as advertising and widgets. In that article I presented a technique that I am using to make external content not affect the user perception of the site speed. In this article I am addressing another factor that may also affect the user perception of site speed, but this time is related to aspects of the server side environment.

In this article he looks at things like other server-side background processes, throttling their CPU usage, throttling PHP's CPU usage and the use of a monitoring class to help you and your applications (and sysadmins) stay on top of what's happening with the server.

]]>Tue, 26 Oct 2010 09:17:55 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/13933http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/13933
Brian Swan has a new post to his MSDN blog today with a list of ten great Microsoft+PHP references (including one or two that don't belong to Microsoft!)

As I've learned (and continue to learn) PHP and Microsoft technologies, I've found some very helpful resources on the web. But, they are sometimes hard to find, and they certainly aren't usually found in one place. So, before I begin drilling into some of the things I suggested in my first post, I thought I'd take a stab at consolidating the resources that I've found to be especially helpful.

]]>Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:15:45 -0600http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/13372http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/13372
Matthew Turland has posted the fourteenth part of his series detailing the features that the popular PHP e-commerce package Magento has to offer to the Blue Parabola blog today. This time the focus is on the site management features.

Features covered include:

Content Staging and Merging

Support for Multiple Websites and Stores

Administration Permission System Roles and Users

Web Services API

Fully 100% Customizable Design Using Templates

If the series interests you, you can mind more great parts in the series in this category on the Blue Parabola blog.

]]>Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:09:11 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/11781http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/11781
Kae Verens has a few tips to help simplify your life with your current content management system by using one code base to run multiple sites.

I haven't studied how other engines do it, but here's how I do it. First off, some benefits to sharing the CMS across separate sites: reduced resource usage, easier upgrades, easier bug-fixing. Convinced yet? Of course you are. Here's how you do it.

There's four steps to his process:

Separate out the site-specific files from one another

Serve all site-specific files out through a "proxy" script that can intelligently grab the needed ones based on the site

Override the default configuration at request time (forcing it to use that "proxy" script)

Create that proxy file that the web server can funnel the requests through (his example is included).

]]>Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:21:33 -0600http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/11306http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/11306
DevShed continues their look at web application security with part six of the series - a look at creating a registration form your site's visitors can use to create accounts/logins.

In this article we will be exploring the registration script of our site. This script is responsible for registering new users for the website. We will also be looking at database security; since the registration script also uses a database table, we will implement some of the concepts that we will be discussing.

Their example is relatively simple - it checks to ensure that none of the fields are empty, that one password matches the other and that the email address is in a valid format (using a regular expression). If it passes completely, its dropped into a MySQL database table that stores current user information.

]]>Wed, 29 Oct 2008 09:33:02 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/10276http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/10276
One of the more popular PHP community sites out there, PHPFreaks, has launched the completely reworked version of their site:

Recently there have been many changes to PHP Freaks. A significant change is the total rewrite and redesign of the main site. The old one was taken down after vulnerabilities were found in the source code. For the last couple of months we have been working on making what you are currently looking at now. The release has been postponed a couple of times, but people have been patiently waiting for the site.

They've added a blog to the mix (which this post is a part of) to help keep visitors up to date on the site's happenings and various other news from the admins. If you find a bug, let them know, otherwise - enjoy the new site and check out all of the same greatcontent.

]]>Tue, 27 May 2008 09:31:00 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9999http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9999
Ken Guest has a quick note about another "planet" site that's been started up for the PHP community - Planet.php.ie:

There's currently five bloggers added to the planet so if you'd like to be added, either contact Ken or Kae.

]]>Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:49:48 -0500http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/7715http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/7715
As anyone who's been developing applications (web or otherwise) knows, there are certain things that you just don't do when you're doing things like adding features or changing the code of a production application. There are some general rules to follow and this new article on the PHPClasses.org website reminds us of just a few.

This article describes software development practices that have been used to prevent problems that can break Web sites.

He also recommends two resources for some additional reading - the Wikipedia entry for "defensive programming" and a chapter from Getting Real (from 37 Signals) about how to "Get Defensive".
]]>Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:11:00 -0500